A Walk in the Woods

down. Actually, my grandmother could have gotten it down. "Maybe not," I said,
disappointed.
"Well, you know what I've got in here, just in case?" Katz said and tapped his shirt
pocket significantly. "Toenail clippers--because you just never know when danger might
arise. I've learned my lesson, believe me, buddy." Then he guffawed.
And so we returned to the woods. For virtually the length of Shenandoah National Park,
the AT closely parallels and often crosses Skyline Drive, though most of the time you
would scarcely guess it. Often you will be plodding through the sanctuary of woods when
suddenly a car will sail past through the trees only forty or fifty feet away--a perennially
startling sight.
In the early 1930s, the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club--which was Myron Avery's baby
and for a time virtually indistinguishable from the Appalachian Trail Conference itself--
came under attack from other hiking groups, particularly the patrician Appalachian
Mountain Club in Boston, for not resisting the building of Skyline Drive through the park.
Stung by these rebukes, Avery sent MacKaye a deeply insulting letter in December 1935,
which effectively terminated MacKaye's official (but even then peripheral) relationship with
the trail. The two men never spoke again, though to his credit MacKaye paid Avery a
warm tribute on his death in 1952 and generously noted that the trail could not have been
built without him. A lot of people still dislike the highway, but Katz and I quite warmed to
it. Frequently we would leave the trail and hike on the road for an hour or two. This early
in the season--it was still early April--there were hardly any cars in the park, so we treated
Skyline Drive as a kind of broad, paved, alternative footpath. It was novel to have
something firm underfoot and exceedingly agreeable to be out in the open, in warm
sunshine, after weeks in impenetrable woods. Motorists certainly had a more cossetted,
looked-after existence than we did. There were frequent expansive overlooks, with
splendid views (though even now, in clear spring weather, blanketed with a dirty haze
beyond about six or seven miles), information boards giving helpful explanatory notes on
the park's wildlife and flora, and even litter bins. We could do with some of this on the
trail, we agreed. And then, when the sun got too hot or our feet grew sore (for pavement
is surprisingly hard on the feet) or we just felt like a change, we would return to the
familiar, cool, embracing woods. It was very agreeable--almost rakish--to have options.
At one of the Skyline Drive turn-ins that we came to, an information board was angled
to direct the reader's attention to a nearby slope handsomely spread with hemlocks, a
very dark, almost black native conifer particularly characteristic of the Blue Ridge. All
these hemlocks, and all the hemlocks everywhere along the trail and far beyond, are
being killed by an aphid introduced accidentally from Asia in 1924. The National Park
Service, the board noted sadly, could not afford to treat the trees. There were too many
of them over too wide an area to make a spraying program practicable. Well, here's an
idea. Why not treat some of the trees? Why not treat a tree? The good news, according to
the board, was that the National Park Service hoped that some of the trees would stage a
natural recovery over time. Well, whew! for that.
Sixty years ago, there were almost no trees on the Blue Ridge Mountains. All this was
farmland. Often in the woods now the trail would follow the relics of old stone field walls,
and once we passed a small, remote cemetery--reminders that this was one of the few
mountaintop areas in the entire Appalachian chain where people once actually lived.